Gary Kim recently asked the question "Is SIP Trunking Mostly About Cost Savings?," which is probably the most-asked question about SIP. It reminded me of my talks on the ROI of technology investments. I usually start those talks by reminding folks that all money spent in a business is supposed to return its investment elsewhere in the business (not some of the money spent, but all of the money spent). This kind of indirect return is the sine qua non of a "primary investment" (i.e., a business.). Only through "secondary investments" (i.e., investing spare funds in interest-bearing accounts, stock and bond funds, etc.) does money ever return its investment directly. More...

Calling SIP Trunking a “bright spot” amid “muted” enterprise spending, the always perceptive Matthias Machowinski, Directing Analyst at the widely respected firm Infonetics Research, wrote about the technology in a recent Connected Planet post. More...

As both a cost-saving method and a foundation-laying step toward Unified Communications, SIP Trunking is a winning strategy. Because SIP Trunking is available from many service providers (some reluctantly, if they’re afraid of losing revenue by cannibalizing their more lucrative local trunks), we want to talk about the Sprint approach. More...

SIP Trunking is one of the hot industry topics this year. Enterprises are gearing up to adopt SIP Trunking as they begin to implement their unified communications strategies. While SIP Trunking is on the rise, many enterprises are still not sure how to best leverage it and its collaborative features, which allow for the seamless integration of desktop phones and mobile devices. More...

Let’s add one more entry to the list of really good reasons to embrace Unified Communications. It’s a great way to help make your company greener, helping the environment and saving money at the same time. More...

Here at Seamless Enterprise, we’ve written a lot about SIP Trunking over the past year or so (such as SIP Trunking as the Foundation of UC, Second Generation SIP Trunking,  and the Sprint UC Story: Planning the Move), but maybe it’s time to take a step back, for the sake of readers who may not be as knowledgeable about the topic as they might like. More...

We typically focus on the positives connected with Unified Communications, but there are still a lot of negative perceptions about UC out there, and an article in InformationWeek looks at some of those negatives, from a survey regarding business drivers for UC. More...

First, to clarify: it is quite common for the terms “Web”, “Internet”, and “Cloud Computing” to be used interchangeably. They are indeed related, but they are also different. When we talk about the Internet, we are describing a network of networks. The “Web”, on the other hand, is a layer on the Internet, and is a user interface technology that makes the Internet usable. And finally, cloud computing, which has many definitions, is best described by Gartner as a style of computing where scalability and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are provided “as a service” using Internet technologies. These services are tracked and metered by use, which allows enterprises to pay for what they need. More...

I was reading a blog from down under about when SIP trunks fail. The article brought up a number of objections that I often hear when discussing SIP trunking with customers, such as: redundancy, reliability, and features. These objections most often come from the data side of the house, as the voice side is used to designing trunking to deal with all these issues.More...

Last week, I started talking about how VoIP and fiber technologies have already triumphed over traditional TDM/POTS and copper technologies. But boy, did I digress and start feeling nostalgic for the old days. Calling copper a "brilliant" final mile solution? I must have been holding the tip and ring a few too many times when ring voltage came down the line. Well, at least I resisted the urge to plug my latest book available on Amazon: "The Joy of Punching Down on a 66 Block," available from IBEW Press. Perhaps I was experiencing a little oxidation of the brain (was my green patina showing?) Anyway, if you think that was a stretch, my goal this time is to show how all this comes back to cloud computing. More...